The American Geophysical Union (AGU) and Atypon, a developer of online scholarly publishing tools, have announced a joint initiative to develop a community server for the open dissemination of Earth and space science preprints and conference presentations. The partners have named this new server the Earth and Space Science Open Archive (ESSOAr).
Preprint servers allow researchers to receive peer feedback prior to formal publication of results. They also facilitate faster, more open dissemination of research. More than 50,000 posters are presented each year across Earth and space science conferences, including about 17,000 at the AGU Fall Meeting. Preserving them will greatly increase scientific transparency.
“Our interest and involvement in the ESSOAr initiative reflects our corporate commitment to open science,” said Georgios Papadopoulos, Atypon’s founder and CEO. “Offering preprint capabilities to support researchers’ editorial needs is a natural extension of our core platform.”
Researchers can preserve and make citable presentations, posters, and related multimedia content from scientific conferences on preprint servers, thus extending the traditional role of archiving manuscripts.
The ESSOAr effort, including development of the server, community engagement, and policies and practices, will be guided by an international advisory board, which currently includes representatives of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, Earth Science Information Partners, European Geosciences Union, Geochemical Society, Geological Society of America (GSA), Japan Geoscience Union (JpGU), and Society of Exploration Geophysicists. Initial development will be supported by AGU’s publishing partner, Wiley, which owns Atypon. AGU hopes that other Earth and space science societies and scholarly publishers will join this effort.
Research outputs posted on preprint servers are fully citable via a digital object identifier (DOI) and are freely accessible. Researchers can preserve and make citable presentations, posters, and related multimedia content from scientific conferences on preprint servers, thus extending the traditional role of archiving manuscripts.
“GSA is pleased to participate in this advisory group to explore all the options for preprint publications,” said Vicki McConnell, executive director of GSA.
Added Kiyoshi Suyehiro, international program coordinator at JpGU, “We appreciate the opportunity to learn about and guide a larger effort around developing preprint options for our community.”
The ESSOAr preprint server will begin accepting content in 2018.
—Chris McEntee (email: agu_execdirector@agu.org), Executive Director/CEO, AGU
Citation:
McEntee, C. (2017), New Earth and space science preprint server to be launched, Eos, 98, https://doi.org/10.1029/2017EO082921. Published on 21 September 2017.
Text © 2017. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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